Conceiving and Implementing the Digital Organization

Abstract

The digital transformation is affecting numerous industries, including media, retail, automotive, transportation, and healthcare. To address the modern challenges of digital technologies, increasing customer demands, and a rapidly changing enterprise setting, CIOs and their IT organizations are required to extend their performance profile, adopting a new organizational design and a broader range of behaviors. Today, CIOs are learning that they cannot manage current strategic, operational and investment responsibilities within existing company boundaries while still ensuring stability and hard cost management. IT organizational units should move beyond their current focus on operations and systems and adopt new behaviors, to facilitate and lead new digital innovations, seize new opportunities, and raise business performance in the marketplace. CIOs recognize that they must remove historical and legacy commitments to create new connections in processes, structures and roles and to reinvigorate IT value potential in a new digital environment. They need to redesign internal organizational interactions to liberate resources, time and attention dedicated to new challenges. They also need to move beyond enterprise boundaries and navigate new ecosystems to search for innovation opportunities. This chapter presents insights on how CIOs must orchestrate innovation across functions and external networks to reinvent and structure value delivery and new business models, stimulating a wider and more productive conversation with different actors. This chapter also argues that CIOs need to combine and harmonize physical and digital, thusly breaking from traditional processes and establishing new digital methods of working.

The views expressed in the paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the company.